How Truman Didn’t Start The Cold War, Part 6
The Myth of Atomic Diplomacy in the Aftermath of Hiroshima & Nagasaki
After V-J Day Truman gravitated more towards domestic politics and left foreign policy to his Secretary of State more often for the next few months. Truman had full confidence in James Byrnes who within a few weeks had to prepare for the first Council of Foreign Ministers established at Potsdam. During this period Byrnes made a small change necessitated by the retirement of Joseph Grew. His choice for undersecretary was Dean Acheson.
At this state Acheson had none of the anti-Soviet reputation he would become known for. He was in alignment with Byrnes in terms of the Japanese surrender and had been involved in the negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks. Acheson was there to help administer the state department and Byrnes agreed to appoint the Republican John Foster Dulles, a foreign policy expert to join him at the various CFM meetings. Byrnes wanted foreign policy to have bipartisan support and Dulles was more than willing to join.
Byrnes made it clear he intended to be a departure from FDR’s secretary of state Cordell Hull; he intended to lead and not allow himself to be ignored by his superior the way that FDR had been more than willing to do throughout the war. By this point many of the major advisers from the Roosevelt era had retreated from the policy scene. Hopkins retired in September, Joseph Davies who was ailing withdrew and Byrnes would never ask him for further advice and Secretary of War Henry Stimson retired after the war.
Alone among them Stimson refused to go quietly into private life. His main job would be an attempt to instruct Truman about using the atomic bomb as leverage in settling postwar issues. While Truman by and large chose to ignore this advice Stimson would attempt to revise it. Worried that if America tried to keep a monopoly on the atomic bomb would fail and lead to an arms race, he began to formulate a proposal for the international sharing of atomic information. He was unaware that Stalin not only had full knowledge of the atomic bomb but after the occupation of Berlin had more than enough material to make its own. Using the Assistant Secretary of War as a go between, he raised the idea of international sharing with Byrnes.
Operating on the same fallacy Byrnes thought it would be an extended period before the Soviets caught up with America. However he also believed that he could use it as a trump card to negotiate with Stalin going forward. Despite meetings both with Byrnes and Truman, Stimson was unable to convince him of this approach. Stimson judged this Byrnes’s approach unseemly but given Byrnes experiences at Potsdam with the Soviets, it is hardly surprising he wanted this advantage.
Yet Byrnes did nothing to commission planning documents or assigned members of his department to consider any potential strategy. For all the talk of so-called atomic diplomacy the fact remains the Truman administration never really tried to use it. Truman left Byrnes to his own devices during this period and seems to have paid limited attention to diplomacy after Potsdam. After the formal surrender of Japan, Truman gave an address that was basically cliched and full of the platitudes of moving towards a better world ‘of cooperation, peace and goodwill.) Not long after he arrived in London Byrnes would realize how distant from reality that would be.
The London meeting began on September 11th 1945, the first of what would be six meetings in the next year and a half to resolve the issues of a postwar settlement. Byrnes and Ernest Bevins very quickly saw that Molotov was resolved to present serious negotiations. Byrnes eventually approached Molotov at the House of Lords and demanded when they might get down to business. Molotov made things very clear by asking if Byrnes “had an atomic bomb in his side pocket” Byrnes waived this off good-naturedly: “If you don’t cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I am going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.”
There was absolutely no seriousness to this threat — which was the most direct effort the Americans ever made to raise the possession of the atomic bomb as leverage over the Soviets. It was met with laughter on both sides and Molotov responded by mocking Byrnes for the American monopoly on the bomb. One wonders why, after it became clear the bomb’s presence wasn’t going to make the Soviets move one millimeter on negotiations, Byrnes did nothing to rachet up the pressure.
John Lewis Gaddis argued: “why didn’t Washington issue an ultimatum demanding the dismantlement of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe, perhaps even of the Soviet dictatorship itself, backed up by the threat…that Moscow would be bombed if it didn’t go along?”
The simple answer is Byrnes didn’t think in those terms at the time of the meeting in London. This was not a case of intimidating a warring power into surrender. The immediate situation simply didn’t call for those circumstances. For all the arguments later made of America being butchers when it came to dropping the bomb on Japan, the idea of bombing someone who was — at that point — still considered an ally never occurred to Byrnes or the administration. They might have been frustrated with negotiations but they had no intention of disturbing the post-war peace. Indeed back in Washington Stimson — supported notably by Undersecretary Acheson — agreed after a cabinet meeting on September 21 to pursue efforts to place atomic energy under international control in what would eventually become known as the Acheson-Lilienthal plan. America was still willing to collaborate with the Soviet Union to build a great collaboration.
And Byrnes would acquiesce on the subject. He continued to focus negotiations with Molotov who gave absolutely no ground on lessening Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Byrnes did everything he could to argue for openness in Eastern Europe and Molotov countered by demanding Soviet participation in the occupation of Japan and certain Italian colonies in Africa. The London conference ended with no substantial progress and the unity of the Big Three in serious disarray.
By now Byrnes was well aware of what Soviet obstinacy foreshadowed and that Molotov was impossible to deal with. In a conversation with an aide, he even compared Molotov’s methods as similar to Hitler’s. Yet Byrnes didn’t abandon hope. Almost laughably he thought he would find a kinder audience with Stalin. He resolved to continue efforts to negotiate in a future meeting he wanted held in Moscow.
Byrnes put the best public face he could on the negotiations in a radio address. In private he criticized the Soviets bluntly. He confided in his predecessor Edward Stettinius, now the U.S Ambassador to the UN “we were facing a new Russia, totally different from the Russia we dealt with a year ago.” Naively he clung to the idea that this had changed since after the war when it had been constant from the start. He was still hoping for a compromise.
Dulles, however, rejected it. The future Secretary of State under Eisenhower made it clear that this would very much mirror the attitude of appeasement by Chamberlain before the war had officially broken out in Europe. He made it clear that if he violated it he would break with the American delegation, denounce it and resign. Byrnes backed down mainly to keep Dulles on the delegation but he remained convinced in the idea of going to Moscow. Even before leaving London he was willing to recognize the Soviet dominated Hungarian government and consider the presence of them in Japan.
He would arrange to have a message sent to Stalin under Truman’s name, assuring him that the administration was determined to stay in concert with the Soviet Union, fulfill Roosevelt policies at Yalta and address the procedural difficulties with the French and Chinese which Molotov had used to sabotage the London gathering.
Truman would later complain Byrnes had never provided him with adequate reports of these meetings. But there is no contemporary record of this. He showed no interest in the details of Byrnes at London and remained supportive of him at the time. Trying to figure out Truman’s own thinking can be hard to pin down, mainly because he himself may not have been sure yet. As was demonstrated at a speech he gave on October 27th he spoke of continued military strength and an American foreign policy “based firmly on fundamental principles of righteousness and justice.” But he also assured that ‘the cooperative spirit of our allies’ could not be allowed to disintegrate and that there were no ‘hopeless or irreconcilable differences between them.” Much of his speech was reminiscent of FDR.
By this point Truman was still focused on his own liberal agenda. By September 6th, he had sent a message to Congress defending New Deal programs and calling for their enhancement and development. He called out for the ‘economic bill of rights’ FDR had outlined with its calls for decent employment, housing, health care and education for all Americans. This would mark the beginning of his ‘Fair Deal’, which he considered “the details of the program of liberalism and progressivism as the foundation of my administration.”
Over the coming weeks and months Truman forwarded legislation for a national health care system and expanding social security. He wanted very much to leave foreign policy in the hands of his secretary of state, leaving domestic policy where he felt more comfortable, to himself. And indeed for well into 1946 Truman continued to most delegate the policies. Both Truman and Byrnes still had the Wilsonian belief that the United Nations would be able to deal with the post-war world. It would take them nearly a year to realize that old world no longer existed and they would have to readjust.
In the next piece I will deal with the true beginning of the Cold War and how so much of the thinking on it even now is misplaced as to who was actually fighting in the early stages and why it really started.